Fire Shut Up in My Bones (20 page)

Children see God every day; they just don’t call it that. It’s the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It’s the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scented breezes. Children feel God stuffed into brown fluffy dogs with stitches strong enough to withstand a good squeeze, and on the lips of round women who can’t get enough sugar from Chocolate.

I began to believe that God is us and nature, beauty and love, mystery and majesty, everything right and good. But I kept my new beliefs to myself, knowing that I had earned myself a new label, one just as bad as the other two, one anathema to all I’d ever known: not only punk and nigger, but now backslider.

That didn’t mean that I wouldn’t spend much of my life chasing the feeling of being “saved” the way it was written and relayed, the way that I had felt it, for the high of it, that feeling of floating through air. I would. I would conscientiously try to trick myself into returning to that place—to relive the remarkable, incomparable peace I had gotten from it. But it was hopeless. It could not be done. Once the curtain has been pulled back, the wizard as you knew him can never be real again.

7

“I’m pregnant.” Those are the two words that changed my life, again.

I was a senior in high school. I hadn’t had a real girlfriend since I shared Jesus with the cheerleader. That courtship ended when I moved away from religion and she moved away from town.

With no new girl to fixate on, I turned my attention to maintaining the person I had become while paying respect to the person I used to be, and on pretending to be “the Big Cat” while still looking out for the underdog. I began to negotiate a fine social line, thin as a kite string, between soaring and remaining grounded, between being a popular boy and remembering that I had once felt like an invisible one.

I knew that the most fortunate kids generally steered clear of the least fortunate, but those were the ones I was drawn to.

The least fortunate were kids like the boy at school with a severe mental disability. “Retarded” was the word folks used in those days. He had unkempt hair that rose in stiff peaks like the burrs that fell from the sweet gum trees. He had eyes that looked in two directions at the same time, and he walked bent over, rising up on his toes at the end of every step, like a boy about to run. Folks said that his mother beat him so badly that he hid under the house with the dogs.

He didn’t want much from me: just a high-five and a smile from the boy who played basketball, the one who never laughed at him. Whenever he saw me, he ran to me with the joyful innocence of a child, loose and happy, the way I had run across the basketball court as a small boy. After he’d slapped me high-five, he’d follow me around, a few paces back, there but not, his face looking like he wanted to say something he didn’t have the words for. I knew that feeling. I knew what it felt like to want to say something but not have the words.

So I did a tiny thing by not doing another: I didn’t shoo him away as others did. And I didn’t let my friends make fun of him. I wanted him to know that when he was near me he’d be safe, that no one would laugh, and that he didn’t have to hide with the dogs. It wasn’t real bravery, just humanity.

At home, I became obsessed with the idea of taking care of things. I first tried my hand with pets. My experiences were always unfortunate. There was the black and white billicat that hid each morning beneath my bed and, as my feet searched for the floor, scratched my ankle until the blood came. There was the pink-eyed white rabbit that disappeared after tunneling its way out of the pen I built on the ground. There was the yellow and green parakeet that froze to death the first night I had it because I didn’t know better than to leave its uncovered cage near our drafty window.

But children were different. I had a way with them. So I took a younger boy from down the street under my wing. He was the son of the neighborhood bootlegger, a woman who lived across the street from the wooded lot where I used to lounge on the fallen tree and listen to the standing ones. Every Sunday afternoon, when the liquor stores and juke joints shut down, her house lit up with a raucous bunch of men and a handful of women drinking hooch, playing cards, and dancing dirty.

She was a big, high-yellow woman with long, thin limbs. She had a nasal voice and a shiny pistol that she was quick to pull and willing to use. Like many of the other women in town, she had once shot her husband for cheating. He had jumped out the window, but not before she shot off half his heel. He would have to do the rest of his street running with a limp.

By now the bootlegger had gotten rid of the cheating husband and taken up with a smiling man who had the same complexion as hers but was much younger, full of himself and able to match her temper. She already had a grown daughter, but when she took up with the young man, to everyone’s amazement she had another baby. He was an extremely light-skinned boy with a rakish crown of fine blond hair like a jumble of corn silk, who substituted
g
’s for
d
’s when he spoke.

Growing up as he did, he saw more than he should have, and he entertained me and my brothers with the details. He imitated people having sex. He described the way his daddy made hooch: “My gaddy take that wine, and my gaddy cook that wine.” And he cursed with the ease of breathing, but not with malice. He delivered the words with a charming, innocent imprudence, unaware of his sin and therefore not guilty of it.

“Gammit!”

“God gamn!”

“You don’t know me. I’ll cuss yo’ gamn ass out.”

I did my best to be an advocate and a mentor to him, to be the kind of big brother that I wanted, to protect him from trauma as best I could, to compensate for what I had lacked.

Besides my mentoring, I still wanted to be a politician, so I started to look beyond Gibsland for ways of speaking and behaving that would shake loose the obvious signs of my strapped upbringing.

I began to emulate two men. One was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, a man I looked up to the way most children looked up to athletes and movie stars. I saw in him simple pride and easy grace, a sort of righteous stoicism—stiff-backed and forward-facing, with a quiet resolve born of long suffering.

For more polish, I looked to the images of a man being beamed into our house from across the ocean, to a prince, the one who a few years before had married a bashful-looking woman named Diana. He was my namesake, Charles. Prince Charles—I liked the ring of that. I pictured myself as a prince—not him, but like him. I studied the way he held his head—up, just so, not haughty, but apart—and the way he held his hands, clasped in front of or behind his body, or one in the pocket of a suit jacket, chest always forward. I studied the way he stood—no fidgeting and no slouching, posture like a pine tree, straight up, tall and slim, a certain coolness in the shade he threw. Thereafter, whenever I wanted to be impressive in public, I mimicked the manners of a King and a prince.

The only place this didn’t work was on the basketball court. There I shed my bent toward coolness, my aversion to fighting, and became prone to aggression, a tendency that spread to my teammates. We became involved in so many fights and near fights in my senior year that the district warned that one more flare-up would get us banned from the state playoffs. Other teams were aware of our warning and would taunt us and pick on me, in particular, because I was proving to be among the most explosive. I barely understood where the anger came from, only that it was there, pouring out with the sweat.

That year, our school arranged to play the team of the academy where many of the white children from our town went to school. When I walked into the gym that night I knew the game was about more than basketball. The bleachers were completely filled—white people on one side and black people on the other. There was an odd energy in the air that heightened the intensity of both teams. With every blocked shot or three-pointer, the whites or the blacks stood and cheered, each reaction outsized.

As the game drew to an end, we held a slim lead. Our new coach told my teammates to get the ball to me so that I could run out the clock. But two of the white boys trapped me against the baseline, and another came over and started to slap my arms and shoulders behind the shield of his teammates—not trying to take the ball, but attempting, I was sure, to make me react violently and kill our playoff chances.

He got his wish. I erupted in anger, lunging for him. My teammates ran to restrain me: “Don’t do it, Blow, you know what they’re tryin’ to do.” I saw that everyone in the gym had risen to their feet, tense and scowling, ready to explode. I realized that if I swung at the boy, not only would our playoff dreams be dashed, but I might destroy the fragile truce black and white folks had maintained in Gibsland for a century. I had to learn to be as controlled on the court as off it.

My efforts to transform myself in all ways were going well until I fell for a girl in my class named Evelyn. She, her brother, and a girl cousin had moved from Texas the year before to live with their grandmother in Gibsland. This was not uncommon. Hometown folks who’d moved away and had children who got out of control in the cities often sent them home to Gibsland.

Evelyn had a short, sassy haircut—rows of curls on the sides and back no bigger than the round of a Magic Marker, and a lick of hair pushed up at the forehead. She had a pretty smile with wet, pomegranate-colored lips, and a laugh so light and sweet that it rained down happiness on all of us like a sprinkle of powdered sugar.

She was a popular girl and a talented basketball player, launching soft, left-handed shots from beyond the three-point line, shots that almost always seemed to fall into the basket. Everything about her said “cool.” Maybe that’s why she walked with her chin held high—not arrogant, but confident. Cool.

Her boyfriend had been a boy named Baron, who was a year older than us and had been on the basketball team with me. He was being raised by his mother; his father was in jail for beating a man to death. At the start of our senior year, after Baron graduated, he too went to jail for killing a man. Soon after, Evelyn made clear that I was the new target of her affections.

It seemed odd, but I didn’t question it. Boys hijacked by hormones don’t really think, they chase. They see risk and consequences as if through the wrong end of a telescope: smaller and pushed far away. There was no way for me to resist the lure of pomegranate lips and chocolate thighs, no way to turn back when clumsy advances were met with such warm agreement. This was the kind of feeling that the male figures who came in the night did not bring, the burning beneath the breastbone, the kind of heat that blinds a boy and reduces reason to ashes.

Evelyn spent many of her afternoons at the house of her aunt, a West End woman not much older than us, who tried too hard to be our friend and not hard enough to be grown. She was the kind of woman who would neither tell her age nor act it. The aunt’s house was near my house, just beyond a bend in the highway from the upholstery shop. Evelyn’s cousin liked Alphonso, my friend who looked at other boys with the kind of look that made them beat themselves up, and whom girls now looked at like they were dreaming. So every afternoon after school, Alphonso and I walked to the aunt’s house to meet the girls.

The aunt entertained us with profane stories about loose living and ghetto loving, talking more to Evelyn and her cousin than to me and Alphonso, teaching them how to milk the most out of a man, and the limits of such tactics. One day when we were there, she warned the girls, “Don’t neva let yo’ ol’ man buy all yo’ stuff, ’cause when he leave, he gone want it all back. I was messing with this ol’ man one time and we went out to eat. We got ta arg’ing and he said, ‘Gimme back all my shit!’ I got to thanking, ‘Dis his dress, dese his shoes, dese his draws, dis his damned wig.’ Hell, if I had-a gave him back all his shit, I woulda walked outta there butt nekked and ball-headed.”

One day when the aunt was out, Evelyn led me to a bedroom. No words passed between us, but none were needed. She was inviting me to have sex. She took off her clothes and lay back on the bed. I took off mine and lay on top of her. I didn’t have a condom. I had never needed one. And she didn’t request that I wear one. I didn’t ask if she was on the pill. She didn’t volunteer the information. None of those thoughts ever occurred to me.

My body entered hers and my senses caught fire. The world slowed down and my mind sped up. My body felt stiff and numb. Her body felt wet and soft and warm, the kind of warmth that piqued the nerves with the crisp of coldness, like summer rain falling on bare shoulders or creek water running over bare feet.

Soon we melted into each other and collapsed in exhaustion. The deed had been gladly done, the pact of passion sealed. We rose and dressed ourselves in silence the way too-young people do, not having the words to express love or gratitude or concern, unable to find a graceful way to part ways.

A few weeks later, she told me: “I’m pregnant.” I was stunned. I didn’t ask if I was the father, I simply assumed that I was, and she said nothing to confirm or deny my assumption. In that moment the whole of my life had to be redrawn. “Father” had to be fit into it. I got up the nerve to tell my mother. “Evelyn is pregnant.” She responded with one line: “Is it yours?” “Yes,” I said, although I realized then that I hadn’t actually asked. My mother simply walked to her room and closed the door.

I don’t remember much about my relationship with Evelyn after that, only that we soon broke up. But I do remember thinking constantly about how best to do right by the baby once it came.

I remember the day Evelyn’s brother came to my class, asked to see me, and told me that she had had the baby. A little girl, to whom Evelyn gave the name I’d suggested. Happy, I ran to my mother’s classroom to share the news. My mother didn’t have a class that period, so she was tidying up. I swung open the door and said with a smile, “Evelyn had the baby.” My mother responded, without ever stopping her tidying, “You know that’s not your baby, right?” I didn’t respond. I just walked out. My heart wouldn’t let me hear it. I wrote off my mother’s comment as derision born of disappointment.